One of the first things Pope Francis said was, “how I would like a Church that is poor, for the poor”. This idea is in consonance with the spirit of Saint Francis, called the Poverello, the Little Poor Man from Assisi. He did not attempt to create a poor Church for the poor, because this was not possible under the regime of Christianity, where the Church had all the power, but he created around himself a movement and a community of the poor, with the poor, living as the poor.

As to his class background, Francis came from the prosperous local bourgeoisie. His father was a rich cloth merchant. As a youth he led a group of bohemian friends ̶ jeunesse dorée ̶ who lived from feast to feast, and sang with the jugglers of Southern France. As an adult he endured a powerful existential crisis. From that crisis there arose within him an inexplicable mercy and love for the poor, especially for the lepers, the outcasts, outside the city. He abandoned his family and business, assuming an evangelical and radical poverty, and went to live with the lepers. Jesus, the poor and crucified one, and the real poor, were the reason for this change of life. He spent two years in prayer and penance, until he heard an inner call from the Crucified: "Francis, go and repair my Church; it is in ruins".

It was hard for him to understand that it was not about something material, but a spiritual mission. He traversed the pathways, preaching the Gospels in the hamlets in the popular tongue. And he did it with such joy, "grazie," and strength of conviction, that it fascinated some of his old companions. In 1209 he convinced Pope Innocence III to approve his Evangelical "madness". There began the Franciscan movement that in less than twenty years would have more than five thousand followers. Four central ideas underlay the movement: a passionate love for the crucified Christ; a tender and fraternal love for the poor, "dame lady poverty"; genuine simplicity, and great humility.

Leaving aside the other central ideas, let us try to understand how Francis saw and lived with the poor. He did nothing for the poor (a leper hospital or place of care), but he did much with the poor, because he included them in his preaching of the Gospels and stayed with them when he could. But he did more: he lived with the poor. Francis assumed their life, their customs, he kissed them, cleaned their wounds and ate with them. He made himself a poor man among the poor. And if he found someone poorer than himself, he would give him some of his clothes, so as to really be the poorest of the poor.

Poverty does not consist in not having anything, but in the capacity to give and give again until everything has been given away. It is not an ascetic path, but the means to an incomparable excellence: the identification with Christ the poor, and with the poor, with whom he established a fraternal relationship.

Francis had realized that possessions come between persons, such that they could not look into each other's eyes and speak heart to heart. Such interests are what lies (inter-esse) between persons and creates obstacles to fraternity. Poverty is the continuous effort to eliminate possessions and interests of any type, so that from there true fraternity may follow. To be radically poor in order to be fully a brother, that was the project of Francis, hence the importance of radical poverty.

It is true that such extreme poverty was heavy and harsh. No one lives on mysticism alone. Existence in the flesh and in the world make demands that can not be denied. How can one humanize the real dehumanization that this type of poverty entails? Sources from that time offer testimony that the brothers looked like "homines silvestres (savages) who eat very little, walk barefoot and wear the worst outfits". But, to everyone's surprise, they say that they never lacked joy and good humor.

In this context of extreme poverty Francis valued fraternity. The poverty of each one is a challenge for the other, to care for and provide the necessary minimum, shelter and security, for him/her, through handouts or work. In this way, giving security and humanization is substituted for having. Francis wanted each friar to fulfill the mission of mother towards the other, because mothers know how to care, especially for the infirm. Only reciprocal caring humanizes existence, as Martin Heidegger showed in his Being and Time. For those who lived totally unprotected, such fraternity in effect meant everything. Biographer Tommaso da Celano described the happiness and joy amidst this severe poverty. Da Celano would write: "filled of saudades, they tried to find each other, and were happy when they could be together; distance was painful, farewells were bitter, separation sad". Being totally distant opened for them the pleasures of the beauties of the world, because they did not want to possess them, only to enjoy them.

Many lessons could be taken from this spiritual adventure. Let's keep one: to Francis, building human relationships must always start with those who are not and do not have the vision of the powerful. They must be embraced as brothers and sisters. The only fraternity that is truly human and sustainable is that which comes from below and from there embraces all others. The Church, such as she exists now, will never be like the poor. But she can be for and with the poor, as Pope Francis dreams of her becoming.

Let us not imagine that saints are free from the vicissitudes common to human life, which includes moments of happiness and frustration, dangerous temptations and courageous stands. It was no different with Saint Francis, portrayed as «the always happy brother», courteous, who lived a mystical union with all creatures, whom he considered his brothers and sisters. But at the same time, he was a person of great passions and profound rage when he saw his ideals betrayed by his brothers. His foremost biographer, Friar Tommaso da Celano, described with cruel realism that Francis suffered temptations of «violent lust», that he knew how to symbolically sublimate.

There is, however, a fact that pious Franciscan historiography hides, but that is well documented by historical critique, and that is known as «the great temptation». The last five years of Francis' life (he died in 1226) were marked by deep anguish, almost desperation, and the grave illnesses that afflicted him, such as malaria and blindness. The problem was objective: his ideal of life was to live in extreme poverty and radical simplicity, divested of all power, and sustained only by the Gospel read to him without the interpretation that often shroud its revolutionary meaning.

As it happened, in a few years his lifestyle captivated thousands of followers, more than five thousand. How to shelter them? How to feed them? Many were priests and theologians, such as Saint Anthony. His movement had neither structure nor legality. It was purely a dream taken seriously. Francis understood himself as a «novellus pazzus», a «new madman» that God wanted for the very wealthy Church, led by Pope Innocence III, the most powerful of all popes throughout history.

Beginning in the Summer of 1220, he wrote several versions of a rule that were all rejected by the gatherings of the fraternity. They were too utopic. Frustrated and feeling useless, he decided to renounce leadership of the movement. Filled with anguish and without knowing what else to do, he found refuge in the woods for two years, visited only by his intimate friend friar Leo. He waited for a divine illumination that would not come. Meanwhile, a rule was drafted that was marked by the influence of the Roman Curia and the Pope, turning the movement into a religious order: the Order of Friars Minor, with defined structure and purposes. Francis, with pain, humbly accepted it. But he clearly stated that he would no longer discuss it, but would continue giving examples of the primitive dream. Law triumphed over life, power confined charisma. But the spirit of Francis remained: the spirit of poverty, of simplicity, of universal brotherhood that inspires us to this day. Francis died amidst great personal frustration, but without losing his happiness. He died singing Provencal songs of love and the psalms.

Francis of Rome will surely face his own «great temptation», no less than the one of Francis of Assisi. He has to reform the Roman Curia, an institution that is about one thousand years old. In it, the sacred power (sacra potestas) has fossilized into an administrative structure. At any rate, it is a question of administering an institution with a population as large as China's: one billion, two hundred million Catholics. But one must immediately be warned: it is difficult for love and mercy to co-exist with power. It is an empire of doctrine, law and order, that by its nature includes or excludes, approves or condemns.

Where there is power, above all in an absolutist monarchy such as the Vatican State, there always arise anti-power intrigues, career climbers, and power disputes. Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviatan (1651) saw it clearly: «power can not be guaranteed other than by seeking more and more power». Francis of Rome, presently the local bishop and Pope, must intervene in that power, marked by a thousand tricks, and sometimes, by corruption. We know from previous Popes who also proposed to reform the Curia, the resistance and frustrations they had to endure, including suspicion of the physical elimination of a Pope by people of the ecclesiastic administration. Francis of Rome has the spirit of Francis of Assisi: he is for poverty, simplicity and relinquishing power. But fortunately, he is a Jesuit, with a different background, and endowed with the famous "discernment of spirits" of the Jesuit Order. Francis of Rome manifests an explicit tenderness in everything he does, but he can also show an unusual vigor, as befits a Pope with the mission of restoring the morally bankrupt Church.

Francis of Assisi had a few advisors, dreamers like himself, who did not know how to help him. Francis of Rome has surrounded himself with advisors chosen from every continent, persons of age, that is, with experience in the exercise of the sacred power. This Pope must acquire a different profile: one that is more nearly of service than command, more divested of than adorned with the symbols of palatial power, with more of the "flavor of the lamb" than the perfume of the flowers of the altar. The carrier of the sacred power must be a pastor before he is the carrier of ecclesiastic authority; he must preside more in charity and less with canonical right, he must be brother among his brothers, but with different responsibilities.

Will Francis of Rome face his «great temptation» inspired by his namesake of Assisi? I believe he will know how to have a firm hand and that he will not lack the courage to follow what his "discernment of spirit" dictates is necessary to effectively restore the credibility of the Church, and return the fascination with the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Since the present Pope adopted the name of Francis, many people are interested again in this singular figure, perhaps one of the most luminous that Christianity and the West have produced: Francis of Assisi. Some call him "the last Christian" or "the first after the Unique," this is, after Jesus Christ.

We surely can say that when Cardinal Bergoglio took this name he was indicating that the Church would be in line with the spirit of Saint Francis. Saint Francis was the opposite of the tendency of the Church of his own time, that was expressed by temporal power over almost all of Europe, including Russia, by immense cathedrals, sumptuous palaces and grandiose abbeys. Saint Francis opted for living the pure gospel, literally, in the most extreme poverty, with an almost ingenuous simplicity, and a humility that kept him close to the Earth, at the level of the most despised of society, living among the lepers and eating with them from the same bowl. He never criticized the Pope or Rome. He simply did not follow their example. As to that type of Church and society he explicitly confessed: “I want to be a 'novellus pazzus', a new crazy one”: crazy for Christ the poor and for “the lady dame poverty” as an expression of total freedom: to be nothing, to have nothing, without power or pretense. This phrase is attributed to him: “I want little, and the little that I want I don't want very much.” In reality, it was nothing . He eschewed all titles, and considered himself, “stupid, small, miserable and low".

This spiritual journey was hard, since the more followers who came to him, the more they opposed him, demanding convents, norms and studies. He resisted as much as possible, but in the end he had to surrender to the mediocrity and the logic of the institutions that presuppose rules, order and power. But he did not renounce his dream. Frustrated, he went back to serve the lepers, allowing his movement, against his will, to slowly transform itself into the Order of Friars Minor.

This unlimited humility and radical poverty offered him an experience that leads to our questions: is it possible to regain the care and respect for nature? Is a universal brotherhood and sisterhood possible that includes all, as Francis of Assisi did: the sultan of Egypt he found in the crusade, the band of thieves, the ferocious wolf of Gubbio, and even death?

Francis showed that this is feasible through a life lived with simplicity and passion. Not possessing anything, he maintained a direct interaction of coexistence with, rather than possession of, every being of creation. Being radically humble he grounded himself in the very earth, (humus = humility) and on the side of every creature, that he considered his sister. He felt as if he were brother to the water, to the fire, the lark, the cloud, the sun and to every person he came across. He inaugurated a fraternity without borders: reaching the depths with the least, at the side of his fellow humans, whether popes or servants, and upwards with the sun, the moon and the stars. All are brothers and sisters, children of the same Father of goodness.

Poverty and humility thus practiced bear no trace of sanctimoniousness. They imply something previous: respect for every being without restriction. Filled with devotion, he moved the worm from the path so that it was not trampled, held a broken limb from a tree to heal itself, in the winter he fed the bees that flew about lost. He placed himself in the midst of the creatures with profound humility, feeling as if he were their brother. He fraternized with "sister and Mother Earth". He did not deny the original humus nor the obscure roots whence we come. By renouncing any possession of goods, rejecting all that could put him above, or possessing, other persons or things, he made himself into the universal brother. He would go to an encounter with others with empty hands and a pure hearth, offering them only courtesy, friendship, love without self-interest, full of confidence and tenderness.

Universal fraternity arises when we place ourselves with great humility in the womb of creation, respecting every being and all forms of life. This cosmic brotherhood, grounded in unlimited respect, is the necessary prerequisite for human fraternity. Without this respect and fraternity, the Human Rights Declaration will be hardly efficacious. There will always be violations for ethnic reasons, for reasons of gender, religion and others.

This posture of cosmic fraternity, seriously undertaken, can animate our ecological concern to safeguard every species, every animal and every plant, because they are our brothers and sisters. Without real fraternity we will never be able to form the human family that with respect and caring, inhabits "sister and Mother Earth". This fraternity demands an unlimited patience, but it also holds great promise: it is reachable. We are not condemned to set free the beast that inhabits us, and that took form in Videla, Pinochet, Fleury and other cowardly torturers.

We hope Pope Francis of Rome, in his practice of local and universal pastor, honors the name of Francis and shows the current relevancy of the values lived by the fratello from Assisi.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Dom Pedro Casaldaliga has just published his introduction to the 2014 edition of the Agenda Latinoamericana, which addresses the issue of freedom. We are pleased to bring it to you here in English. Previous issues of the Agenda are available on Servicios Koinoniaand the Agenda now has a Facebook page too!

With her earthy voice, echoing many ancestral voices, Mercedes Sosa offers us a deeply human invitation:

Our 2014 Agenda welcomes the invitation by making freedom its subject and challenge.

Mercedes, with revolutionary tenderness, characterizes freedom as something tiny. What tininess! Tiny and grand, like the mystery of the freedom of every person and every people and all of human history. Tiny and tender as a fetus, as awesomely large as hate.

Oh, freedom, freedom! In your name, the most beautiful heroic actions have happened and the greatest iniquities have been committed. You are a banner of life and a banner of death.

In the Agenda, we touch on the subject of freedom in all its dimensions, seeking to know and experience complete freedom, which has many aspects, which is a gift and something to be won. It's in the anthems of all nations and in all anthologies. It's basic in all religions. Religion, ultimately, is the dialogue between two absolute freedoms -- God and the human being. In the Christian faith, specifically, we proclaim that Christ freed us so that we would be truly free. He assures us that "the truth shall make you free." To be free, to become free, to embrace freedom as a spiritual process and political experience is to make our humanity more and more humane. Knowing with a critical and self-critical spirit how many enemies beset our freedom. Just a game of justification takes us from freedom to licentiousness and that "tiny thing" dies, like a bird without wings, in our hearts, in our families, in our work, our citizenship, in our personal lives, and in our society. And suddenly we find ourselves slaves -- slaves to fear, to selfishness, to money, consumption, power...

We speak of liberty and we speak of liberation. Liberation cannot be sidestepped through spiritualism or disembodied personalism. Freedom is political; in our Agenda, it's political with that clear option that the Zapatistas advocate: "always from below and on the left."

True freedom is communitarian, an exercise in give and take relationships. I'm free if you're free. "There is no freedom without equality." Nor is there freedom without dignity, a dignity that's so often killed by ideologies and systems, a victim of individual or collective selfishness, but also victorious through exemplary acts of resistance that make a way from behind bars, through marginalization, torture, and censure. The list of martyrs to freedom is infinite.

On the occasion of the commemoration of the misnamed Discovery of America, the Agenda Latinoamericana y Mundial was born to stimulate alternative awareness and action. And this awareness and action would translate into service to the Great Causes, Our America, the Third World, the World. And in each Agenda, we go on highlighting the critical historical moment of those Great Causes. The signed texts are the responsibility of the author, but the whole Agendabrings together contentious burning issues, in a broadly ecumenical and macro-ecumenical spirit. By talking together again and again we become more humane. In going over the 22 editions of ourAgenda, it's comforting to see how this dialogue has taken effect and been updated, how grassroots activists, students and professors, politicians, pastoral agents, and community facilitators have come into the arena.

Mercedes' song asks us to "go together to seek" freedom and liberation. Let's stimulate the awareness that we bring and carry "a people in our voice" ("un pueblo en nuestra voz"). Let's not let "that tiny thing" that guarantees our dignity be snatched away from us. "Es nuestra tierra la que espera sin distancias ni fronteras" ("It's our land that awaits without distances or borders"). Against all tyrants, despite all empires, getting outraged every day and translating our outrage into unstoppable acts and processes.

Definitely:Without fear of Freedom, which is the most dehumanizing fear.Without fear of Freedom, that is, without fear of Life.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

I sometimes read the comments on the National Catholic Reporter. It is a fascinatingly depressing exercise in raising ones blood pressure to its upper limits.

One commenter recently, a neo-con troll, ranted and railed against the evil of the LCWR (without ever substantiating allegations) based purely, it seemed, on the fact that the Magisterium didn’t like them and that was enough for him. He was assured in his right-ness and righteousness because he always aligned his opinion with that of the Catholic hierarchy. Any deviation, or questioning of the position of the Magisterium, was the sin of self idolisation and arrogance and it was his duty to bring this truth to the sinful and ignorant. The irony of his arrogant pronouncements was entirely lost on him. For someone who could quote encyclicles and cannon law, he seemed woefully ignorant of basic formative Catholic theology.

Even back in the earliest days of Christian theology, when systematic theology was in a stage so infantile as to be fetal, the primacy of conscience and the necessity of questions was recognised. The earliest church dedicated itself to holding important councils; Nicea, Chaldean, Alexandria, all these councils were held to decide exactly what was and wasn’t orthodoxy and what was and wasn’t heresy. And they did this through questioning, discussion and debate. Augustine had his “faith seeking understanding” that exhibited itself in his dialectic form of writing. Later, Aquinas and Kant spoke of the primacy of individual conscience, and the need for Christians to critically engage with their faith, if only to ensure that they were not being deceived or tempted by the Devil.

Catholics who suppose themselves to always to be correct as long as they align themselves with Vatican pronouncements are committing a far greater sin than self idolisation. In denying the primacy of their own conscience, they are denying the aspect of themselves that carries the image of God, and so are guilty of self-deicide. When they suppress the conscience in favour of conformity, when they demand uniformity over the unity that comes from free and open dialogue, they attack what is most unique and beautiful about humanity; our self reflective and self expressive conscience. They attack the very gift that God gave us that marked us as above the angels; free will. They deny the God of revelation, who continues to speak through the Holy Spirit; the God who is constantly revealing more and more about who God is. They deny the God of salvation history, who can continue to work within history today to address old and grievous social sins and injustices.

These neo-cons are prisoners to their own lack of conscience. Their entire notion of themselves as right and good is predicated in the opinions of others, and their own ability to align themselves to those opinions. They are cyphers; vampires that cast no reflection and whose entire identity would be lost were the Magisterium to do one of it’s rare and spectacular 180′s. They have created themselves on the shifting sand of human institution and fooled themselves, through historical revisionism and academic dishonesty, that they are surely founded upon an eternal rock of continuous truth. The only eternal foundation humanity has access to is its conscience. It is the conscience that is the mark of the image of God, and so it is the conscience, and the conscience alone that is eternal and absolute truth.

The denial of the primacy of conscience is often accompanied by the insistence on eternal, ethical, absolute truths; homosexuality is always and eternally “intrinsically disordered”, women are always and eternally barred from the Priesthood, contraceptives are always and eternally condemned. But if conscience is the eternal and absolute truth, as only conscience can be if it is in conscience that we find the image of God, then none of these external “absolute truths” can be absolute truths precisely because they are external and have nothing to do with the image of God and so cannot carry the mark of eternity.

Neo-cons need external absolute truths because they have severed themselves from the absolute truth within. They need the idols of external absolute truth because they have killed the internal absolute of conscience; they have killed the God within.

To live out the Gospel is not to recreate the social norms and biases of a bygone era in our own, modern world and call it eternal. To live the Gospel is to live in an ever shifting world where the only thing that can be relied on is the spark of the eternal within; the conscience. It is to live as the nuns do; to recognise that caring for and sheltering homeless LGBTQ youth is of more immediate importance than denouncing their sexuality as the Vatican would like them to do (particularly when the entire concept of sexuality as sinful is so theologically unsubstantiated and in need of free and open debate). To recognise that the time to condemn is not when a person is already on the floor, bent and broken. To recognise that their conscience demands more of them than the easy reaction of disgust and pontification and condemnation; it demands the absurd reaction of love and compassion and service. It demands the absurd conviction that the eternity of God is internally accessible to all us mere mortals, and the courage to trust that internal eternity even when the external “absolute and eternal truth” is diametrically opposed to the conclusions of ones conscience. It is all that is beautiful and unique within the human condition and evidence of Gods perverse sense of humour because, it would seem, the only eternal truth we have access to is the fact that we have access to the eternal truth, and beyond that we just need to have faith that we are getting it right and ask questions to make sure we don’t get it wrong.